


Hot and Cold

by stereolightning (phalaenopsis)



Series: The R/T Fics [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 11:51:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1981926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phalaenopsis/pseuds/stereolightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus and Tonks share a moment together after their adventure on the Knight Bus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hot and Cold

The purple, triple-decker bus disappeared with a loud bang. Tonks watched Harry, Hermione, and the Weasleys drag their trunks along the icy, deserted road leading to the edge of the Hogwarts grounds. Pigwidgeon bobbed along after them, barely bigger than a Grimmauld Place dust ball, his excited hoots echoing in the cold air.

Remus exhaled a white plume that drifted upward and was lost in the cloud-dimmed backdrop of Hogmeade village. Tonks fiddled with the pilling insides of her mittens.

“What were you telling Harry?” she asked.

“To try and put up with Severus for the rest of term,” said Remus, stowing his hands in his coat pockets.

“Think he'll listen?”

“I hope so. Sirius is deeply upset about the whole thing. He said he'd teach Harry himself, but Occlumency is one of the few things he has no natural talent for.” He turned back to her. “Well, Priscilla, shall we go back to London straightaway?”

“Priscilla? Oh,” she said, catching up to the joke as she remembered that she was still disguised as a tall, middle-aged woman with grey hair. “Yeah, I was thinking my name was one of those really fussy old wizard ones, Atalantia or Perspicacia or some such thing.”

He laughed. “Yes. Or you could be Minerva's little sister. You just need some tartan.”

She giggled. “Have to work on my highland dialect, though.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, in a passable Scottish accent, “that's the tricky bit there.”

“Hey, not bad.”

He shrugged. “Sirius is much better than I am at that sort of thing.”

“Fancy a hot drink, then, while we're here?”

“Well, I would hate to refuse you anything, Perspicacia. I'm sure you're a fascinating dining companion. I am a bit short of funds, however.”

“My treat.”

“I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“You aren't asking. _I_ am. Come on. I like the Hog's Head.”

He smiled, a warm smile that lit up the whole street. “All right.”

They crossed the empty road and strode over to the boar's head sign. Remus pushed open the door.

“Such a well-mannered young man,” she said, winking. “What'll you have? Brandy? Butterbeer?”

“Whatever's cheapest.”

A moment later, she sat down with him in a dark, smoky-smelling corner and placed two steamy mugs on the table between them.

“That'll warm you right through,” she said, and then gulped back a hot mouthful. She continued, in her very best venerable-auntie voice, “Go on, lad, drink up. In my day, we never dithered around with our drinks.”

He grinned at her over the top of his mug. “You do take kidding around seriously, don't you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, young man. I am no less than fifty-six years old.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes.”

His eyes twinkled. She liked that. She liked making him do that.

He had interesting lines on his face, this Remus Lupin. Harder lines than somebody his age should have, and you could easily mistake them for age or addiction. But her mother had always said you ended up with the face you deserved, that time would carve out of your soft skin the true expression of your soul, and if that was so, then this man's face told a story of wit in the face of worry, of amusement woven in with loss. Tonks was a student of faces; she catalogued unusual noses, chins both weak and strong, quirks of lips and dentition. The visage before her was an intriguing one. She had thought, more than once, that she might like to test out those lips with a kiss, to see if they felt as good and warm and careful as she imagined they might.

“Your disguise is slipping a bit,” he said.

“What? Oh,” she said, and her face flushed, and she could feel that her hair was turning brown again, just at the ends, and falling out of the careful, tidy curls she had willed into it this morning. “Mind wandering. I suppose I don't really need to keep the act going in here, do I?”

She let the rest of the metamorphosed face and hair go, squinched up her eyes in concentration, then let her usual pink, spiky hair return.

“Give Perspicacia my regards,” said Remus.

She opened her eyes. He was smiling into his mug.

Then he looked up and said, “I'm so sorry, I don't mean to be rude.”

“What? You haven't been rude.”

“Haven't I?”

“No. What are you on about?”

“Oh. I thought – well, I understand if you don't always want to be looked at, when you're... changing.”

She shook her head. “I don't mind, really.”

Then his meaning struck her, and she opened her mouth, and then closed it again.

“Well, I can understand if you don't enjoy being looked at, or if perhaps I made you uncomfortable because you thought I saw you as a curiosity,” he said. “Which I don't.”

She blinked a little, and then she remembered that he sometimes transformed in the company of Sirius-the-dog, and she wondered whether Remus felt uncomfortable then, changing shape unwillingly in the moonlight, even with a friend. To be a Metamorphmagus was to inherit a suite of particular bodily horrors, yes, but it was nothing to what Remus had to deal with. Did Sirius look away, or flinch, when it happened? And if he didn't, were his dark dog eyes full of pity?

“S'okay,” she said, hoping to steer the conversation away from potentially painful thoughts. “I like having a bit of fun with it. Still makes my Dad laugh, sometimes, if I do a really good pig snout at Sunday lunch.”

He sat back a little and the smile returned. “Do you do that? Sunday lunch with your parents?”

“'Course I do. Haven't got any choice. They're a Slytherin and a Hufflepuff, you know, and they do a pretty decent good-cop bad-cop routine if I don't show up to lunch.”

“Yes, I'd imagine Andromeda can be quite - ”

“Majestic, terrifying, yes. Mum really is something when she gets going. Wait a minute, have you met her?”

“Oh, once or twice, a long time ago. I think she was keeping on eye on Sirius. Which he needed.”

She set down her mug. “But – but have we met before, then, you and me?”

“Not officially.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Not officially? What does that mean?”

“Never formally introduced. But I seem to remember something about a little girl with lavender hair, standing on an icy rooftop, shouting at her mother, at a Christmas party many years ago, and I'm fairly certain that was you.”

Tonks' face flushed even hotter. “Oh, god, I'm mortified.”

“Don't be.”

“I am, though.”

His eyes went soft and sympathetic. “It was sweet, actually. James got you down, and he took you for a ride on his broomstick.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Gallant. That was James all over.”

She realized that he was mostly remembering his friend, that this recollection was not so much about her as it was about Harry's father. Still, though. Hell of a first impression. She didn't remember that incident at all, but it sounded plausibly like a scene from her childhood. She was thankful for the low light in this dark corner of the bar, because it partially hid the reddening of her cheeks. She rubbed her nervous fingers against the tweed of her skirt.

Did he think of her as a child, then? Here she had been thinking they'd had a bit of a partners-in-crime thing going, what with all the Order missions they had done together. But perhaps all that gentle humor had been coming from a teacherly or even paternal place, rather than camaraderie, or – as she had begun to suspect – flirtation.

“Suppose you'll want to get back to London,” she said absently into the dregs of her drink.

“I ought to,” he said.

“Have to get back to Sirius.”

“He could use the company, yes.”

They got up together and plucked their coats from the enchanted coatrack by the door, which was singing, softly and inexplicably, in what sounded like Italian. Remus caught Tonks' eye and smiled. He handed her back her scarf, which had some how become entwined with his own. His fingertips brushed hers lightly, then retreated.

Once outside, they walked a few paces away, toward the road.

“Together, then?” he asked, holding out his arm to her.

“Yeah,” she said, and took the proffered hand in hers.

They turned together on the spot, a familiar dance, palms touching. Time and space bent around them, but the swooping sensation in Tonks' stomach could not be entirely attributed to apparition. Bands of pressure encircled her, light and sound and electricity and gravity became a singular sensation, and she gripped her wand and muttered a non-verbal spell, and then, all at once, ice was pelting onto her from above.

They had apparated to an alley near Grimmauld Place, and hail was falling. Her heeled shoes slipped a little on the slick street, and Remus caught her, and she fell toward him, into him, getting a faceful of slightly wet traveling cloak. He smelled like soap and wool and books. Before she could apologize or register her embarrassment aloud, he had cast some sort of umbrella charm, so that the falling ice arched away from them.

When she looked up into his face, he was smiling contentedly.

“Nymphadora.”

“Don't call me that.”

“My apologies.”

“You're absolved.”

“Tonks.”

“Yeah?”

“I prefer this to the Knight Bus, don't you?”

“Hmm. Wetter. But less vomit.”

“Excellent assessment.”

She sniggered quietly through her nose. A circle of hail had formed around them, at the edges of the umbrella charm, like a fairy ring.

“Remus, there's a cab coming. A Muggle cab.”

He flicked his wand and the umbrella charm fell away. A second later, a blue umbrella appeared out of thin air instead. The dark cab rounded the corner and slid up the street toward them.

“Quick thinking,” she said.

“And you. How did you know it was coming?”

“Super-sensory charm.”

“You cast one just as we arrived?”

“Force of habit.”

He looked at her, still smiling. The blue of the umbrella reflected softly onto the angles of his face. She thought she might like to stand there with him forever, as the sky fell all around them, and the dirty planes of concrete and bitumen hissed with shattering hail.

"You're shivering," he said. "Let's get you back in the warm."

**Author's Note:**

> The anecdote about James and Tonks and the Christmas party comes from another fic I've posted here, The Die Is Cast, and this fic was partly inspired by gilpin's comment about whether Remus would tease her about it one day.


End file.
